The corresponding dielectric void at the solvent-membrane interface has a radical consequence on macromolecular interactions. Namely, the absence of this dielectric decrement in the solvent-implicit PB formalism implies that the latter underestimates the interfacial electric field \(E(0)\propto \varepsilon ^{-1}_{\rm eff}(0)\)  by a factor of \(\varepsilon _{\rm w}\)  (see Fig. REF (b)). This means that the attractive component \(P_{\rm el}=-\varepsilon _{\rm eff}(0)E^2(0)/2\)  of the double layer force associated with the interfacial field energy is also underestimated by the DLVO theory by the same factor. Considering that this error induced by the assumption of local dielectric response is nearly of two orders of magnitude, the experimentally corroborated accuracy of the DLVO formalism is somewhat puzzling [1]}, [2]}. In this work, with the aim to shed light on this peculiarity, we asses the contribution of the explicit solvent molecules to macromolecular interactions between charged membranes.
